RETROSTAR OUTLINES, CHRONICLES 58-62, & EPILOGUE I

Chronicle Fifty-Eight, A.S. 8732

1. Chiron’s PQ Plan The Blue Centaur, escaped from long retirement in Roncommon, has returned to the Upper World almost against his will. With no desire to mix in public life, he keeps to the seclusion of ice caves in the glaciered mountains of West Bear Island.

Now and then a passing Indian stumbles on his hideaway, and carries away strange tales of having met a beast shaped like part-man and part-horse, only much larger than either could be. But exposures to public view were very rare, and Chiron kept it that way as much as possible. Yet something was changing in him. He felt an increasing urge to leave the Earth. Penned in the depths so long, he seemed to want to...fly! Abilities that he had long suppressed now came to the fore. The more he tried to suppress them, the more they came out. He had always had the ability to fly--but hadn’t shown any interest in doing so until now. This ability now drew him forth into the world, for people were likely to see him trying out his wings. He had no wings, true, but immense mental concentration gave him wings, as people saw a blue horse-man soaring through the clouds and then vanishing just as quickly as he came. Hearing of the flying horse, a young warrior grew determined to find and ride it, which would make him the greatest warrior in the world. With such a steed he knew he could defeat any foe, including the most fearsome monsters infesting the world. One such monster had taken up residence in his own part of West Bear Island, sallying forth from a cave on the Great Mountain to make raids on a wide area around the mountain. How could Chiron foresee, even with his perspicacity, that his innocent desire to fly would embroil him in a great war--the War of Heaven and Earth? And he certainly never thought he would be the means that would be used to defeat a most powerful Atlantean who had an aim to make the whole Earth her slave.

2. Elektra’s Comeuppance The commander-in-chief of the Atlanteans in exile continued to hatch her plans to re-assert Atlantean control of Earth--always a slippery object in a world ruler’s grasp. In turn, she had no grasp, despite her still impressive fire-power and starfleet, that something had changed in the game and she was, in short, an anachronism. Wary of confronting star-stones since her last nearly fatal brush with the red star, she was,. nevertheless, unafraid and committed to re-establishing the Atlantean imperial throne over Earth. The loss of the Algol and other clients seriously weakened her Co-Prosperity Sphere, but she set out to fill the gap herself, without learning from their defeats. Whatever had destroyed the Algol was unknown to her. She could not find it in her to believe in flying “humans butterflies,” champions that had arisen to deliver the Earth from such as she. No, humans were weak creatures she could dominate and enslave, using them for labor and plasma sources. They were not at all a threat, as she viewed them. Earth was hers to rule, and if the humans did not like that, it did not concern her in the least. It was, therefore, a shock to find herself under attack by one of the flying humans, who happened to be riding a Blue Centaur.

3. Mink and the Flying Horse A young Paiute brave wanted to make his mark on the world in a big way. He needed some victory to show that he was as great a warrior as his people had ever known. Not content with ordinary life, he heard of the Flying Horse in the mountains and set out to capture it. With the Flying Horse he thought nothing would be impossible to him. He had no idea that this streak of vainglory in him would lead him to victory but also multiple, personal disaster. In the process he has a rendezvous with flying monster, the marauding Chim of the Rain Mountain, as well as with a star-stone and Atlantean forces--all formidable in their respective powers.

4. Uwe Hantsbo’s Last Farewell Elektra escaped the destruction of her starfleet, which also detonated her power crystal power base, and as she fled in a shuttle she searched her remaining options. What about the Hidden City Crystal? With it she might regain all! Just then a computer virus by the name of Uwe Hantsbo took control of the shuttle’s sound and navigation systems, informing her that she is going to be dunked in the sea in a very short time. Though Hantsbo had perished thousands of years before, running to elude her executioners, the maverick genius has managed to extend a very long arm into the future and capture the queen bee of the Atlanteans.

5. The Wandering Paiute Mink finally pushed the gentle, long-suffering Blue Centaur too far, and Chiron throws him to the ground and flies off. Returning home to his village, Mink tries to assert himself as chief and mighty warrior but soon learns that he is the cause of the deaths of his brothers who tried to reach him with good news, not the thing he had assumed. Running from his guilt, he wanders the earth until the very ground rejects his restless moccasins. In a quake a huge fissure opens up and divides the landscape, and to make sure he does not try to leap it and perish in the attempt, he is turned to stone by the same Finger of God that has split the earth. Strange things come to be said about the man-like figure encased in stone from the waist down. Some travelers say they heard it speaking! His widowed mother hears of the Speaking Stone, and she goes and finds Mink. She stays with him until she dies, and a second stone figure takes on her likeness. But some say it is not her but a young woman the stone warrior had once loved and lost. Whatever the truth, the two figures stand guard on a plain of immense value, a congealed flood of the fabulous orichalc that a comet had spilled on the earth’s surface--an asset that will someday figure in a struggle for world domination.

6. Wally and the Nano-Queen The Algol may have been vanquished when Molu and Brun dealt the death blow to the spider-scorpion component, and Molu, recovered from a near disastrous end, gave the Gorgons the coup de grace, but the Master Parasite was still at large. This thing--for it was more crystalline than carbon--was the actual controlling agency in the Algol. The Queen, in particular, was a deadly thing, and against her Wally was sent, a pitifully down-sized version of the former mighty Cray. Perhaps, the diminution was intended to humble him for the even smaller dimensions he would have to assume in order to do battle with the Nano-Queen of the Algol. “Algol” means “Ghoul,” or “Demon,” and the Master Parasite truly was a fearsome, sinister shadow. Gritting his electronic teeth, Wally goes forth to track her down, without any idea what he will do if he happens to find her. Has anything changed for him, since he first was involved in the War of Heaven and Earth? Only now he has so few assets and powers, while the Algol nano-queen has every advantage. Yet he must go--since the Commander-in-Chief, Yeshua Himself, has commissioned and sent him to do battle.

7. Michael’s Last Trump Meanwhile, on Earth I, the economic and social disorder and deep moral decay of politics in the last decade of the 20th Century combine to advance the career of a bizarrely new kind of leader--an entertainment titan and pop icon turned wannabe world savior and apostle of peace and Gaia-worship. There events are building up for something very big--either a World War III that will destroy all civilization, or a peace treaty between the Israelis and the Arab World that will resolve all the world’s tensions and usher in the brave new world of peace and prosperity everyone wants to see happen. No one wants to see the latter more than Michael, the unisex pop star who has parleyed his billions into a vice premiership of the EU. Will he be able to pull it off with his world peace initiative? Earth I, while Earth II has been undergoing its long fight-to-the-death with the ten Stones of Fire and various aliens and Atlantean vampires, is poised, East against West, Arabs and Moslems against the Great Satan of Western Powers and Israel, to take the final leap into the nuclear maelstrom of Armageddon. Michael, not the angel, plays a trump card to snatch world peace from jaws of certain war over the tinderbox-like Holy City of Jerusalem. In his dizzy career the unisex pop star has taken a number of spectacular dance steps. The biggest landed him in the European Union as Vice Premier. Immensely popular as a world pop star, Michael has the money to fuel his wildest dreams--the most wild being his World Peace Initiative. The Israelis have proven the despair of their American allies, but Michael, with EU backing, is free to do what they have failed to do--get the Israelis back to the table regarding the Golan Heights, the chief thorn, next to Jerusalem, in the backside of the Arab and Moslem world. All the politicians and statesmen have failed miserably. Everyone knows that. But Michael--it appears to be his finest hour as he steps aboard his state Concorde to fly to Tel Aviv. The only fly in the ointment is that he also plans to erect a crystal display of himself in the soon-to-be restored Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. What he cannot guess is that this little exercise of vanity will provide the catalyst for the world conflict that he ostensibly is doing his all to help the world avoid.

Chronicle Fifty-N ine, A.S. 10, 272 The Blind Man Who Could See

Chronicle Sixty, A. S. 10, 282, 1. The Shadow Line 2. The Lacquered Wardrobe 3. A Pilgrim's Heart 4. Talulah’s Star 5. South by Southwest 6. The Gray Wolf 7. Lux ex Tenebris

On East Bear Island, in the southern part once known as Georgia, an old man in a small town of Makon tells a boy some tall tales that the boy is too likely to believe. “Naw, that one you thought was your mother ain’t--she ain’t!” With a mother he had never seen, off somewhere in an institution, the boy is hard put to disagree. And as for his father, no one will tell him a thing--even this old, blind man, and his grandmother too. Determined to find out what has happened, the boy grows up and one day finds a trunk in an attic that gives him the first solid clues. Confronting his close-mouthed, genteel grandmother, he learns a few more vital clews. Then he leaves home, takes a plane to the middle continent, where the clews lead. On his flight is a beauty queen from Georgia, Miss Talulah Coldbank. Determined to track down his real father and discover his true identity, Homer and Miss Talulah tangle with each other and the re-emerged Topaz star-stone in a way that is nearly fatal to both. Meeting a number of cold and blood-thirsty people (one is a waitress at the Multan Imperial Hotel bar with a long scar winding around her arm), they fall captive of international politics and a madman’s plan to take over the N uclear bom-terrorized world, even if it means a nuclear exchange with other world powers--all while a Black Hole stands on the horizon about to gobble up the entire fiasco! The Emerald and Topaz have done their work well. Can Homer survive? Will he discover who he really is amidst a society that is making every effort to snuff him out? The answer lies in his identity, a discovery that unwittingly provides the catalyst for the destruction of the second Atlantis and much of the two Americas to the north.

After the ashes settle, out on the fringes of human society life struggles to pick up the pieces, and like during other world disasters it manages to survive--though barely so. It might have furnished comfort for them to know that there comes light even out of darkness, evidence that only faith can see during particularly dark times. Yet not only faith can see it. A realm, once imagined, then created, still exists-- the realm called Cyberspace where just about anything can and does happen. Wally, looking head while he still had the capacity of a gigantic-brained Cray, had set in motion a little game of his own. It wasn’t really a game, true, but it was definitely warm-up for the real thing someday. Enlisting the photographic wing of the U.S. Army’s Ninth Air Force in World War II days, he does a little reconnaissance. The mission to film the beaches of Normandy in preparation for Eisenhower’s Operation Overlord returns successful with the film, and then a startling discovery is made that lets one captain in on the real secret of the mission.

Chronicle Sixty-One, A.S. 10, 995 1. Five Stars for the Long Road 3. Pilgrim, Bluebird, Starboy 4 The White Stone One-Legged might have turned out much like any other youth in the Lakota tribe on West Bear Island. Who would have ever dreamed this Lakotan would confront not only the Black Hole but a Topaz and an Emerald, the fatal pair that has nearly destroyed the world with a nuclear holocaust? Yet he had some unusual aspects about him, his name, which had been given to him at birth by his mother when an injured, one-legged bluebird escaped a hawk and flew inside the tipi. Then there were the patches on his head that glowed at night--five of them. He spent too much time in the defunct Quinn Ceylon Nuclear Plant near his village. It was the chief lodge, in fact, of the tribe, and was used on many ceremonial occasions. But the aspect that set him most apart from ordinary youth was his visionary ability. This came to the attention of the tribe’s medicine man, who happened to be the youth’s father. But the vision One-Legged had was beyond his father’s comprehension. It seemed to be a game, a game about Doors or Portals. One-Legged used colored sands to paint the game, then, as he was instructed in the vision, asked anyone who could to play and win the game. Whoever won would restore the Broken Hoop of the World--broken by the Wasichu, who had hurled fire through the heavens at each other, destroying themselves and also hurting many of the Lakota and other tribes on the Bear Islands. Healing often went with visions, and so it was with One-Legged. He came to see that he could heal, and his father helped him in learning how to best go about this art. His father, like so many adults, did not live out many years, and when he died he gave One-Legged all his healing equipment. Then, free to do what he wanted, One-Legged set out to find the champion of his vision-game, impelled by his strong feeling that such a champion was desperately needed to restore the wounded and sick world. How strange he found things wherever he went. No one seemed to care and accepted things as they were--though conditions were very bad. The tribes were broken in spirit and body, and fought against each other in their distress. Distressed himself by what was happening, One-Legged traveled on, questing for the Champion of the Game. Would he ever find Him? When he does find the Champion, the winning Player has a gift for One-Legged, a new name and a White Stone. This is given him after One-Legged has awarded the Champion the Black Crystal from his medicine pouch--a jetstone that has traveled a long, tortuous journey of its own to reach its point of fulfillment. He has not himself played and won the Game. He merely stood the test of faith and found the player who could.

2. ARGO Unrequited Understandably, the Alpha Centaurii colony of exiled humans never really gave up their desire to resettle on Earth. Though they had been severely disillusioned a time before, they made a thorough search and finally located the Earth, this time moved quite a distance out to 3C 295. Knowing nothing of the star-stones, or how and why Earth had moved, the A-C’s landed amidst what appeared to them to be another impossible situation--and they were right. Unable to play the game, they are doomed to wander forever looking for their niche, unless someone gives them a clew that will open their eyes to what has happened while they were gone.

4. Zu the Birdman Preserver of the Tablets of Destiny, Zu fled Mesopotamia and sought refuge in the Land of Red and Black, ancient Mizraim. Ages have passed, but his sacrifice and hard work pay off for humanity when the information about the former world before the Re-location becomes known.

5. The Tiger of Hagi Even the most militaristic, lock-step societies can produce a maverick now and then. Torr was such an individual, and his quest for an alternative to Hagi, the bleak and regimented Cygnusian world he calls home, leads him back to Earth after a disastrous rebuff that destroyed the Nergulian starfleet. It is his death sentence to return to the Blue Planet, but he had seen something there that he cannot resist.

6. Quinn gives his black stone (the Jetstone of Pieter van de Wordt) to Yeshua and receives a specially tailored stone that contains his own destiny, designed before the foundation of the world by Yeshua, which also carries a secret name of healing known only to him and Yeshua. This is the white stone foretold by the Revelator, Saint John, and promised to every believer in Yeshua.

Chronicle Sixty-Two, A.S. 10,999 Voyage of the Cybernauts: Quest of the Arkstone This last battle of the War of Heaven and Earth is really Wally’s long-overdue retirement, or at least his idea of retirement. Though his precautionary reconnaissance has landed him the position of ship lookout, he must not have known what he was taking on, but it was not his fault that a retirement game, which was intended to provide some amusement and recreation for his sunset years (after all, he has earned a nice, little cruise to see interesting people and places by defeating the lethal nano-queen of the Algol), is corrupted by a security system into a deadly zero-sum Wargame full of sharks. By this time the only star-stone left to defeat by humanity is the Carbuncle, the great fluor spar that once lighted the interior of the ark for Noah and his family during their epochal odyssey on the waves of the Great Flood. This is the stone of apostasy and unbelief, and, perhaps, it is the most insidious and destructive of the lot, even including Universe-destroying Wormstar. Wally the lookout and a ship of Cybernauts (for this VR) set out to win the treasure of the Golden Fleece, which is guarded by a monster.

Dr. Pikkard is the captain of the White Ship, the ARGO, so that is a great help, but their antagonist is just as able in his, or its, way. The outcome is not at all certain to go right for the men in the white sailor caps. The ending is very bleak, as the White Ship loses and is terminated. But something is won, nevertheless, that makes all the difference in the quest--with the added bonus that the Carbuncle explodes. Just what is gained by the explosion of the Carbuncle is what proves to be the real prize--the fabulous Golden Fleece, which is something far more valuable than a fleece of a ram, however golden.

Epilogue I to the Gabriel Tall Chief chronicles: “The Last to leave, please turn out the light...”

Duamutef, the former chief priest of a moon god in Mizraim, has landed in Hades, but he is not content just to suffer a just punishment, he begins preaching about the Most High God in this most unlikely of places. Some believe and he tells them the Most High will send His Son to rescue them. The vast majority scoff and heap abuse on him for his efforts. But there comes a time when the scoffers have their curses and oaths thrown back into their teeth. The Unwrought Stone smashes suddenly through the great bronze doors of Hellgate, and word spreads instantly that the Mighty One has come. Believing the report, Duamutef does the unthinkable. He leaps, actually runs across, the chasm that divides the Hills of the Blest from the damned on the burning plains of Tartarus. He watches aghast as the Unwrought Stone opens and a holy and glorious procession issues forth, beginning with whirlwinds and other marvels and increasing in degree of awesomeness as Cherubim, with feet like blow-torches, and four wings apiece, fly out crying “Holy! Holy! Holy!” before the coming King of kings and Lord of lords, the Man Yeshua, the Anointed One, Who calls Himself the A and the Z, the Beginning and the End, and One who died and now is alive forevermore. But this, for the self-condemned, is the End, for the A-Z has come to conduct the second and last Harrowing of Hell. Duamutef, and his followers, are the souls “harrowed” out of the flames. The former chief priest can scarcely believe his eyes as he witnesses the red, many-segmented beast that comes huffing and puffing out of the Stone bearing multitudes of the Redeemed. When they are assembled in ranks, the last one to step out is the A-Z. He now appears in all His glory to Duamutef’s eye. All ten crown jewels of the Lord God are fully restored to Him after being lost many, many thousands of years before, when Lucifer the Archangel rebelled and stole them, perverting their natures to conform to his own twisted character. But not only the Stones of Fire are restored, the Title to Earth is in Christ’s hand. It too was won back from the enemy at great cost to God and His people, many of whom gave their lives for it. The third item was won a time before--the keychain of Death and Hell. Seeing all this the former priest is so overwhelmed that he almost fails to get on the “Glory Train” as it loads up and begins to depart. Invited by an angel, Duamutef no longer hesitates. Last to board, the A and the Z. He does something that is strange to see just before he boards: he takes a piece of his glory and flings it into the darkness of deep space. Shaped like a shepherd’s crook, it flies across the Universe, for what purpose he does not say. And then with Yeshua aboard the train vanishes back into the Unwrought Stone, which is but the beginning of a New Universe, an eternal Paradise where no sin has ever laid a stain, nor evermore could, since all on board, unlike Adam and Eve, had chosen the Tree of Life and eaten of it. With the closing of the East Gate, the light, once so glorious that the depths of the Earth were more radiant than the Sun, goes completely out for those who heard but refused to believe.

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